Philip Lamantia (1927–2005) was a distinctive American poet closely associated with Surrealism and the Beat Generation, though his voice always remained uniquely his own. Discovered at a very young age by André Breton, Lamantia became one of the few American poets to be formally embraced by European Surrealists, and this influence shaped his lifelong poetic vision.
Lamantia’s poetry is marked by dream imagery, erotic mysticism, visionary intensity, and spiritual revolt. His poems often move through altered states of consciousness, blending Catholic symbolism, occult references, ecstatic desire, and political resistance. Unlike many Beat poets who emphasized raw autobiography, Lamantia leaned toward oracular language—his poems feel spoken by a seer rather than a confessor.
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Works such as Erotic Poems, Touch of the Marvelous, and Bed of Sphinxes reveal his fascination with the subconscious and the sacred, where love, death, and transcendence collide. His language is lush, incantatory, and at times hallucinatory, inviting readers into a realm where logic dissolves and revelation takes over.
Philip Lamantia’s poetry stands as a bridge between European Surrealism and American counterculture, offering a body of work that is intense, rebellious, and spiritually charged—poetry that seeks not comfort, but awakening.
Blue Grace
crashes thru air
where Lady LSD hangs up all the floors of life for the last time
Blue Grace leans on white slime
Blue Grace weaves in & out of Lüneburg and ‘My Burial Vault’ undulates
from first hour peyote turnon
Diderot hand in hand with the Marquis de Sade
wraps himself up in a mexican serapé
at Constitution Hall, Philadelphia, 1930
Blue Grace turns into the Count of Saint-Germain
who lives forever
cutting up George Washington
dream of pyramid liquefactions from thighs of Versailles
Blue Grace intimidates Nevil Chamberlain
feels up Fillippo Marinetti
and other hysterics of the phallic rose
Blue Grace dressed up as automobile sperm
My Claw of the future
and the almond rose Rich the Vampire wears
over the US Army
— flags !
american flags !
flying like bats
out of ‘ My Burial Vault ’ !
flood museums
where Robespierre’s murder is plotted
— floated from Texcoco,
the Prince of Bogota caught redhanded
sniffing forty cans of Berlin ether !
Hydrek ice blue teeth
impersonates, psycho-kinetically,
the resurrection of Blue Grace as prophetess of the anti-planet system
Blue Grace under dark glasses
getting out of one hundred white cars at once !
Cars of ectoplasmic tin-types
go to the juncture where Blue Grace Glass is raped
at the Court of Miracles, Mexico City, 1959
Blue Grace undressed
reveals tattoo marks of Hamburg, sea & storm of
Neptune-Pluto conjunction
Rumors of war
strafe the automation monster
walking to universal assassination
K & K and the russian poets
suck Blue Grace’s opulent morsels, back & front
The nicotine heaven of Bosch’s painting
emanates the thousand beauties of
Christopher Maclaine’s tool box
of mechanical brass jewels
Man,
the marvel
of masturbation arts,
intersects Blue Grace
at World’s Finale Orgasm Electro-Physic Apocalypse !
I sing the beauty of bodily touch
with my muse, Blue Grace
The Islands of Africa
Two pages to a grape fable
dangles the swan of samite blood
shaping sand from thistle covered fog
Over sacred lakes of fever
(polished mouths of the vegetable frog
rolling to my iron venus)
I drop the chiseled pear
Standing in smoke filled valleys
(great domains of wingless flight
and the angel’s fleshy gun)
I stamp the houses of withering wax
Bells of siren-teeth (singing to our tomb
refusal’s last becoming)
await the approach of the incendiary children
lighting the moon-shaped beast
Every twisted river pulls down my torn-out hair
to ratless columns by the pyramid’s ghost
(watered basin of the temple stink)
and all the mud clocks in haste
draw their mermaid-feather swords
(wrapped by Dust) to nail them
into the tears of the sea-gull child
The winter web minute
flutters beneath the spider’s goblet
and the whores of all the fathers
bleed for my delight
A Little Washington DC Dream
The Due D’Aumal’s cannonballs
Are being marshmellowed 370 years from their masonic inception
Now lie on the Potomac
The Due D’Aumal’s balls cannonaded
Split
Through mirror teeth Washington D.C.
Black City of white rectangular bits of fear
Blown fluff of fear
O the Duke of Aumal’s balls are raging
Yellow vermin white houses of fear
And beautiful funky people
Diamond heart D’Afrique
Human blood human need
Black booming emotional vibes of life
White geometry of abstract cerebral death
I really saw at Fort McNair
In front of American General’s mansion
A fir-tree tied down to a black coffiny box
Jefferson’s phantom always rides tonight
There’s a solar splendor burst from Eighteenth-Century Cannon of the Due D’Aumal
I’m sure Citizen Lafayette was no dixiecrat
Meadowlark West
Choppers in the night husk the brilliants of thought
Beyond the cities of patina grow caves of thought
Coyote Hummingbird Owl are rivers of thought
The lumens the pumpkins dance: pits of correspondence over the land
Birds the dream tongues warble Iroquois Mojavé Ohlone
Market Street of “The Mad Doctor” via the occult centers
A gang of fox spirits at the crossroads
Bandoleros set between the obliteration of grizzly bears painted by an Arcimboldist and the monstrance of bleeding chains
Montezuma’s feathery headdress torn up in the boondocks of the Rosy Cross
Coyote girls in myth-time
At the central dream of edenic treasures
The irrevocable annihilation of christian civilization is taking shape with carnivorous flowers of volcanic thought
Witness
Because the dark suit is worn it is worn warm
with a black tie
and a kiss at the head of the stairs
When you hear the dark suit rip
on the heart’s curb the hurt is big
rose flesh caught on the orange woman’s buttons
As you talk metropole monotone
antique intelligence
as you dress wounds by peyotl looming the boulevards
women hunt their children from you
who look out
lit still inside of a dark suit
